UK taxpayers hoping to talk to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) about tax credit payments were left fuming last week because of a “routine upgrade” to its database.
An HMRC spokeswoman told The Register that the tax credit system had been taken offline - just before the end of the tax year - so the latest rates from …

Inputted?

Known Knowns?

Kind of shows the competency on government IT projects. Either the brief was poor or the implementation but in reality both. Surely a budget often results in changes to the tax system so how it cannot have been envisaged that new rates would need to be inputted from time to time (probably once a year) is unbelievable. Especially 1 weeks downtime. I could understand 1 hour to ensure there was no overlap as the rates were applied but even that should be unnecessary.

Even now couldn't they just put the rates into an offline set of tables and then just make them live when needed?

No suprise

The age of HMRC's hardware

Knowing Whitehall's aversion to change and penchant for soldiering on with out of date equipment and anachronistic practices, they're probably taking the equipment offline to give the coal-fired boilers a service.

@Ian

That's not the only reason

Besides updating the rates, they had to take it down to make some adjustments for the completely unexpected and unpredictable addition of an extra day to February this year. Obviously there is no possible way they could have prepared for this in advance.

Outputted

Leaving people on benefits in the lurch

I have a friend who is a recently made single mother with two teenage kids who is reliant on her weekly child Tax Credit in order to feed and look after her kids (Who'd have thunk it?!). She is now two weeks without a cheque and can't get any info out of HMRC who have helpfully told her that the systems will be down until the end of the week. Countless phonecalls to HMRC and she is getting nowhere. All the helpline can suggest is to call the local tax office... and their number isn't published. In fact they won't even give it out if you manage to call another dept in the same building. So her only option is to get a bus across to the other side of town with the kids and sit in their reception until someone can give her a sensible answer. They can't even give her an 'emergency' payment as they can't even look up in the system whether she is eligible for the payments in the first place.